Basically the title
In: 7
It depends on what you mean by “recreate life”. We’re very good at taking cells from living things and growing them in Petri dishes, almost indefinitely at this point. We’re also good at synthesizing any stretch of DNA, RNA, or amino acid chain to make basically any protein. The problem is that there are about 20,000 proteins and even more once you start counting the modifications that can be done to change their behavior/purpose. Some of them will kill the cell if not in a very slim range of concentration. We also don’t even know what all of them do.
Asking how we can’t recreate life now is similar to asking why people couldn’t go to the Moon in the 1930s. They had the manufacturing capability, knowledge of flight, and knowledge of what the Moon was, but they just couldn’t put all the pieces together for another ~40 years.
TL;DR: we have the theoretical capability right now to make the machinery of a cell, but it’s so complex that we don’t know how to do it
Latest Answers